Today’s guest is University of Texas historian John Lisle, author of the chilling and brilliantly researched Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.
Despite official attempts to destroy records of the CIA’s LSD-fueled search for mind control in the 1950s and ’60s, the truth has been dribbling out, especially in recent books and documentaries such as Steven Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief and Errol Morris’ Wormwood.
Lisle’s work draws on previously unknown depositions and documents to deliver the most definitive—and disturbing—account yet. He discusses the twisted logic of Cold War secrecy, the bizarre figures behind and victims of America’s darkest experiments, and what MKUltra reveals about the dangers of unchecked power in a democracy.
And this might be the most important thing: He and Nick Gillespie talk about why conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of transparency—and how to preserve skepticism without surrendering to paranoia.
0:00—Intro
1:32—What is MKUltra?
3:42—Brainwashing origins in the Korean War
6:50—Who is Sidney Gottlieb?
10:43—The CIA’s startup culture
20:37—Who is Ewen Cameron?
24:32—Jolly West and implanting memories
28:24—MKUltra gets shut down
31:08—How MKUltra documents came to light
39:38—Main lessons from MKUltra
46:57—Politicization of intelligence agencies
51:03—Conspiracy thinking and the legacy of MKUltra
58:31—COVID-19 and the collapse of righteous authority
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Transcript
This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: John Lisle, thanks for talking to Reason.
John Lisle: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
All right, the book is Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra. I suspect that our more conspiracy-minded and history-minded listeners and watchers know what MKUltra is, but summarize what MKUltra was.
Yes, thanks for having me again. MKUltra was this program by the CIA, starting in the 1950s. And the goal of MKUltra was to determine whether methods of mind control are possible. The CIA wanted to know, for instance, whether you could create a truth drug—could you give someone you’re interrogating a drug that can make them spill the truth, make them tell the truth no matter what? Could you slip something in someone’s drink and make them behave in a certain way—either make them seem erratic or potentially control their behaviors and beliefs?
That’s kind of the overarching goal of MKUltra. They did that through various means. Some of the reasons why the people who were in charge of it were interested in this kind of thing—someone like Sidney Gottlieb, who led MKUltra, this chemist in the CIA—he was worried about the potential for communist countries possessing these kinds of methods.
For instance, Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, he had done behavioral conditioning in the 1890s—ringing a bell and getting a dog to salivate. Well, if you could do that to dogs that far back, surely the Russians since then have been improving upon their methods. So, if they’re doing it, we need to know how to do it ourselves and we know how to defend against it.
It’s kind of an amazing thing, as we get more distance on the Cold War, the idea that we have to be more like the Russians or the Soviets than they were in order to defeat them—in order to be supremely American. We’re doing everything they’re doing, but better. It’s peculiar.
The concept of brainwashing, which is kind of rattling around in the back of MKUltra and other CIA fever dreams—and, you know, some of them are legitimate. I mean, it’s clear there were conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States and other free countries of Europe. But the concept of brainwashing came out of the Korean War. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because that’s also—I mean, it’s the first Cold War conflict, or a proxy war. But what was going on in Korea, and how did that really inflame the desire to be able to force somebody to tell the truth, or to control and manipulate them?
Yeah, you’re exactly right about the importance of this Korean War, too, because during it, there were several American pilots who were captured in Korea, and while they were POWs, they started confessing to very strange crimes.
For instance, many of them started saying that they were engaging in biological warfare against the Korean people—for the Americans, while they were flying over, they were dropping anthrax bombs or germ bombs or bubonic plague germs or something like that. We now know, from some Russian archives actually, that some North Korean officials had flown to China and had gotten cultures of bubonic plague to infect their own prisoners to make it seem as if the Americans were doing this.
But still, the question remains within the CIA: why are these American POWs confessing to these crimes of biological warfare? One potential explanation they come up with is maybe they’re being manipulated in a certain way to do this. Maybe they’ve been brainwashed or mind-controlled through drugs or through hypnotism. Again, maybe the communists possess some kind of mind control technique that’s causing these POWs to do this.
Now, it turns out afterward, when many of these POWs returned to the United States, they’re, of course, interviewed and asked about what happened. One of the people who interviews them, in fact, is Jolly West, who plays a prominent role in the MKUltra program. And he comes to the conclusion—again, this is ironic because he’s later going to be working on MKUltra—but he comes to the conclusion that it wasn’t these esoteric mind control methods that the communists were using to manipulate people. Instead, it’s the typical methods of coercion that people have been using for centuries. It’s sleep deprivation and fatigue and food deprivation, and having an actual…
I mean actual, right? Physical beatings and more—
Exactly, yeah. So he comes to that conclusion. And you kind of mentioned the irony of this earlier, about how the Americans are recapitulating a lot of what the communists are doing or trying to catch up to what they’re doing. Again, it’s ironic because they weren’t doing these mind control methods in the sense that the CIA thought they were. And yet, even when the CIA figures that out—they have multiple people write reports on this—what’s actually causing these POWs to confess to these crimes? It’s not the mind control methods. Yet the CIA still wants to develop those methods, because, “well, it was a potential if they could’ve done that, therefore, if the potential exists that it could have happened, we want to know whether we can do it now.”
So let’s talk—we’ll get to Jolly West, who’s one of the most ironically named people in history. I mean, he’s just not a jolly man at all. Really a deeply fucked up person who, unfortunately, was able to do a lot of bad things to a lot of people and really not pay a price for it.
But Sidney Gottlieb, who, as you mentioned, is a chemist who became the head of MKUltra—who was he, and why did he ultimately fixate on drugs and things like LSD in particular?
Yeah, LSD is going to be the big one they start using within MKUltra. Sidney Gottlieb is a chemist from New York. He went to school at Caltech. He got his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry there, and that was right around World War II in the 1940s.
He desperately wanted to join the war—he wanted to join the Army—but he was denied because he had a limp. He suffered from a limp; he had clubbed feet, he was born with. He also talked with a stutter—not that that mattered for joining the Army—but he talked with a stutter, he walked with a limp, so he was denied entry into the Army.
After that, he kind of felt this debt that he owed to his country. His parents were immigrants from Hungary. This country had given them a good life and allowed them to raise him here. And so he felt that he wanted to pay back his country in some way. He thought it would be through service in the Army during World War II. When that didn’t pan out, he got a series of jobs as a chemist at different companies and universities, but eventually he decided to apply for a job at the CIA—to serve that debt that he felt he owed to some government organization.
And it just so happened that the CIA was looking for brilliant scientists like himself to fill certain roles, because World War II had just shown how integral science was to national security. So we better have some scientists on our staff. He wound up there.
And it’s interesting, though—for a mind control guy, he’s not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He’s an agricultural chemist, right?
He is a chemist. You’re right. You mentioned LSD earlier. One of the main reasons why the CIA becomes interested in this drug is—well, one is just happenstance. LSD is first developed by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938, I believe.
’38, and then he accidentally ingested it 5 years later.
Yes, exactly. So it’s kind of a new drug. And when the CIA gets hold of it, it is an extremely potent drug too. It’s a powerful hallucinogen. Just a tiny amount can have such profound effects. So they’re immediately interested in this drug, because it obviously has profound effects on human psychology.
And if that’s the case, then it makes itself very useful, potentially, in covert operations, because such a small amount can be slipped into someone’s drink or put into a cigar or something. It could make someone potentially behave in a certain way. If that’s the case, then it might have a lot of potential use.
And it was starting to be used by therapists and whatnot. I mean, Sandoz Laboratories, where Hofmann worked, didn’t quite know what to do with it. So they actually were sending it out to researchers and saying, “Hey, here’s a compound that has these qualities, which are pretty off the charts. Do you have a use for it?”
You know, it’s funny—LSD is a new drug in the early ’50s and the mid-’50s. MKUltra officially starts in 1955 or—
’53.
And so the CIA is also a very new organization. Your previous book was about the OSS, the wartime CIA that gave rise to what we now know and all love and patriotically support to the max as today’s CIA.
Did the CIA know what it was doing, just broadly, in terms of countering… I mean, the main thing was, “we’ve got to keep the Soviets at bay.” Because at that point, China was kind of in the orbit or under the umbrella of the Soviet Union. The big break between the Soviets and the Chinese communists hadn’t yet happened.
Talk about—it’s weird to think of the CIA as kind of like a startup, but they had so many different things going on, many of which, when you look back now, you’re like, what were people thinking? But how important to the development of MKUltra—and one thing that you stress throughout the book, which I find fascinating—is that one of the lessons or questions that needs to be studied is: Why didn’t anybody say, “What? Why are you doing this? This is insane.”
How did that young startup culture kind of affect how the CIA was doing?
A lot, I think, because a lot of the freewheeling attitude of the OSS—this wartime intelligence organization, kind of the precursor to the CIA—a lot of those same people would end up in the CIA, and that same kind of mentality carried over. So I think that’s part of the reason why you have that freewheeling mentality in the CIA. It’s because, well, during wartime, that’s what the OSS was doing, and it’s the same people within the CIA.
And these were twilight—I mean, again, this is outside the purview of this conversation, but World War II was a twilight struggle between forces of fascist authoritarianism—from imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—and so anything went in order to preserve whatever we called freedom. And that mentality was just ported over in the CIA from World War II, right?
It was, exactly. Instead of the Germans and the Japanese, now it’s the Soviets who potentially might be the existential risk. And so, well, if we were resorting to those kinds of methods during World War II—in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department—I talk about how there are truth drug experiments, there are all kinds of wacky experiments about bat bombs and painting foxes with glowing radioactive paint and all kinds of things these scientists were doing.
So if we had to do anything we could to potentially stop this existential threat during World War II, well, of course we have to do that to the Soviets as well, because this might be even more of an existential threat in a certain sense—because they actually have nuclear weapons now. The Germans didn’t have that, but the Soviets actually do. So yes, that mentality got carried over. So that’s one of the reasons why it is fairly freewheeling.
And the last point you made in your original question is a very important one. Raising the questions of: Why was nobody stopping this? One of the things that also makes this a very freewheeling CIA in the 1950s is that there’s such heavy compartmentalization that hardly anyone knows what anyone else is doing. When we think of MKUltra, we think, “oh, the CIA—this huge organization—is masterminding this. There must be hundreds of employees who are working on this and performing these experiments.” That’s not actually how it was.
Within the CIA, there might have been a couple handfuls of people who knew about MKUltra. Within these hundreds and thousands of employees, there might be a dozen who know that this is going on. And so with that compartmentalization, without people being able to peer into what their peers at the CIA are doing, there’s no one to really stop or ask questions. “Hey, why are we performing these experiments? Why are we funding these researchers at universities to dose kids with—you know—university students with LSD, or prisoners, or so on?”
There are several reasons that make that happen, and the compartmentalization is definitely one.
And then, on a larger scale, the original CIA director, he understood that the way he was going to operate is that he would tell the president what was going on if he was asked.
As one of Allen Dulles’ codes, you know.
Yeah. When you look at the history of the FBI, there’s something parallel going on. It starts a few decades earlier—officially as the FBI in the ’20s or whatever—but J. Edgar Hoover understood that it was in national security interests not to really offer any information to the president. And it was kind of chilling, actually, to read in the book the way that that gets described here—especially because Eisenhower, who’s the president during this, he knows how to fight and win world wars. And I guess he didn’t want to know too much either, right? Like, everybody wanted plausible—
That’s a good point, because it’s in the president’s personal interest to preserve his or her’s plausible deniability. For instance, I talk about assassination attempts in this book, and Sidney Gottlieb is intimately involved in those.
And that was MKChaos—or what was the code name for the assassination stuff?
I don’t know if there was a code name within the CIA for that, but there was a kind of group within the CIA called the Health Alteration Committee—you know, kind of a flippant name. That’s what they were in charge of.
During one meeting, Eisenhower kind of tells his CIA counterparts, “I’m interested in having Patrice Lumumba kind of knocked off. What can you do about that?” And of course, whenever they refer to this in writing afterward, they never say Eisenhower. They say, “We’ve been told this.” But it’s preserving the plausible deniability, which leads to this vicious cycle of abuse that happens because nobody’s going to be held accountable if there’s no paper trail to name anybody associated with what’s going on.
Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, was the subject of a biography a couple years ago called Poisoner in Chief, which is a fascinating read. And one of the things that’s fantastic about your book is that it covers similar territory, but it also looks at it in a different way—in a definite frame that adds a huge amount to it.
What more can you tell us about Gottlieb when he was running the show at the CIA? How quickly did he understand that there really are no such things as mind control drugs?
I think it took him a while to understand that. But one of the things I think that makes my book unique and exciting, too, is I found dozens of depositions that happened as part of a lawsuit in the 1980s. It never went to trial—it was settled out of court—so these depositions sat in the Library of Congress for many decades.
I found them, and it’s verbatim transcript of not only the perpetrators of MKUltra, like Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, and even Richard Helms—the director of the CIA—he is deposed. But also the victims of MKUltra. These depositions—it’s thousands of pages of them being asked questions by these lawyers: What did you do? Why did you do it? How did you feel about it?
So I feel like my book allows the reader to get into the head, in a certain sense, of these people. And that’s what makes it especially exciting.
It is terrifying to read—and also exciting. I was thinking, as you describe these documents and then start quoting from them, I mean, as a historian, that must have been like discovering the—I don’t know—the Grand Canyon or something. It’s like, holy cow, is this real?
I was very excited, yes.
So with Gottlieb—he’s a true believer. He is a patriot and all of that kind of stuff, and he wants to help the U.S. and the free world defeat the communists. When did he start to realize that this whole project was just kind of wrong.
Yeah, it depends on which kinds of subprojects. MKUltra was composed of 149 subprojects, and most of those were where Gottlieb and MKUltra would fund independent researchers who were at universities or hospitals or prisons to either continue doing the research they’re doing or alter it in a certain way.
So not all the experiments that are part of MKUltra were done by the CIA. This is funding many people to do this. I would say by the late ’50s, it was fairly obvious to Gottlieb that drugs might not be the way to do this.
He says in his depositions, “we kind of understood with something like LSD, you could make someone lose their mind, you could make them appear crazy, but you couldn’t control them like a marionette. You couldn’t make them do what you wanted them to do.” In other words, you couldn’t create a Manchurian Candidate or something like that.
However, after the drugs, he turned to psychiatric techniques. Well, if you can’t do this through drugs, maybe we should fund other subprojects that don’t use drugs but instead focus on sensory deprivation, or electric shock therapy, or what was called psychic driving—like repeated messages playing through headphones, thousands and thousands of times for hours on end, for days on end.
The idea was that maybe we can break down a person’s psyche and then kind of build them back in our own image. If we induce enough stress in them, then maybe they will forget their previous behaviors, and we can control them with new behaviors by implanting those in them. That was kind of the idea.
There are several subprojects that are funded—most notably Ewen Cameron—that focus on psychiatry. Of course, after several years, Gottlieb also comes to realize that you can’t really create someone in your own image in that way.
People aren’t behaviorists. It’s not that all of your behaviors come from nurture. Some of it is nature, and you can’t reduce someone to a blank slate and build them back up. So he becomes disillusioned with MKUltra, as he talks about in his depositions. And he seems kind of remorseful for it by the 1980s, when these lawsuits happened.
I think there’s always a lot of remorse when you’re being deposed in a civil trial—even though by that point he had absolute immunity and whatnot. And it is fascinating to think about the figures of the counterculture like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg and whatnot, who had great fun at various points later in their careers thanking the CIA for bringing boatloads of LSD into American laboratories—where it escaped the laboratory.
And so, on a very large societal level, we saw the failure of MKUltra to make people act a certain way ultimately gave rise to a kind of hippie counterculture that completely changed and got out of control from what the original intentions were.
You mentioned Ewen Cameron. He might be a good person to talk a little bit about—specific programs and experiments that were being funded by the CIA through MKUltra and just how batshit crazy they are. Could you talk a little bit about him?
Yes. Ewen Cameron was this Scottish psychiatrist, and he was a giant in the field. At one point, he had become the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association.
He had been in Nuremberg at the end of World War II because he was one of the psychiatrists who was evaluating these Nazi prisoners to determine whether they were fit to stand trial. This is where we get the Nuremberg Code—one of the first points of which reads, “you need to have the informed consent of the subjects who you’re experimenting on.”
It’s very ironic. He would go on to do many of these experiments funded by MKUltra that were patently unethical—not getting consent from these patients, not even telling them that he’s doing experiments. They just thought these were tried-and-true treatments and he was helping them.
He’s this notable person—well, if you commit yourself to his institution, the Allan Memorial Institute, you just assume that he has your best interest in mind, when really he’s trying to experiment to find a cure for all mental illness, and he’s performing all these wacky things that CIA becomes interested in this because they think that through some of the methods he’s doing—like electric shocks, like sensory deprivation—you might be able to induce amnesia. And the CIA is very interested in making someone forget certain things. So let’s fund him and see if that’s possible.
One of the stories in the book that comes from a deposition is of Mary Morrow, who had been a neurologist working under Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute. So she had been on one side of it.
And this is in Montreal, right?
This is in Montreal, yes. She had been on one side of it, working under him as a resident in training to eventually become a doctor. And she had kind of a mental breakdown herself. She developed severe anorexia. She also failed some of her neurological exams and so she didn’t get her degree.
She went into this deep spiral of depression and wound up in a hospital. Ewen Cameron comes to visit her and asks her, would you like to come back to the Allan—but not as a resident, as a patient? And she reluctantly agrees. She goes, and now she’s on the other side of it.
Her perspective in the depositions is very interesting and unique because she talks about how, before she was a patient, when she was there, she thought that what they were doing was in a sense ok—because there were some consent forms that Cameron would use. But by the time that she had gotten there as a patient, he had stopped using the consent forms.
So she was subjected to this electroshock therapy, as they called it, and it reduced her to a level at which she couldn’t put on her makeup. She couldn’t put on her clothes. Her sister eventually had to come in there and bust her out, basically.
There are stories in Cameron’s own writing, in his own notes, where he says, “We reduced this one woman, this nursing student who was 18 years old—we reduced her to basically a vegetable. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t use the bathroom. She would pee her own bed.”
So, all kinds of effects on these people for the long term.
Yeah, and the Canadian government paid money out, right, to several of his patients.
They did, yes. So in the 1980s, there were some lawsuits filed against the CIA—really, the Orlikow lawsuit. Velma Orlikow was one of the patients.
And in order to stave off lawsuits against the Canadian government, who had also given some money to Ewen Cameron, the Canadian government paid out some ex gratia payments to several of these patients—several thousand of dollars each.
And then in the lawsuits with the CIA, I think there were about eight or nine plaintiffs in this lawsuit. They settled for a total of $750,000 to be split among them. But, of course, you take out lawyers’ fees on top of that, and they don’t wind up with much.
And the lack of accountability of the people who were kind of working the levers—or turning up the knobs on the ECT treatments and stuff.
Maybe talk a little bit about Jolly West, because he is like—if it was a Robert Ludlum book or something, he would be a bad character. He would be an unconvincing character, because it’s just too much. But who was Jolly West, and how did he end up becoming a kind of key part of what was going on through MKUltra?
Yes, he’s in charge of one of the subprojects. He’s mostly focused on drugs—and hypnotism to a degree—trying to determine whether it’s possible to implant memories into someone. Can you induce false memories?
But he comes into my story because he’s working at Lackland Air Force Base, and he has a correspondence with Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb is using a pseudonym—Sherman Grifford—but we know it’s Sidney Gottlieb.
They have a correspondence where West talks about some of the experiments he’s hoping to try out on some of these airmen. So I start the chapter on Jolly West talking about this tragic story of this young girl—a 3-year-old girl—who’s murdered and sexually abused by this airman named Jimmy Shaver.
Jolly West is in charge of interrogating Shaver, and he uses some of these techniques on him while he does. He gives him some drugs, and he hypnotizes him. I have the transcript of the interrogation, which I lay out in a lot of detail in the book. That’s where he comes into my story, Jolly West.
Like Ewen Cameron, Jolly West—and it seems like a lot of these people who were funded through MKUltra—they have almost a messiah complex: I’m destined to win the Nobel Prize. I’m destined to cure schizophrenia and all mental illnesses. I just have to figure out how that is.
So I think he had that kind of complex himself, and he was always looking for some sensational case to attach himself to so that it would get him more publicity. But that’s Jolly West in the story.
Most famously, probably, if someone’s heard of Jolly West in connection to MKUltra, it might be related to Jack Ruby, you know. But also, Jolly West is the guy who killed an elephant with LSD. So if someone has heard of him, it might be for that—he dosed an elephant.
Yeah, could you very quickly recount that?
Yes. He wanted to determine whether it was possible to create this musth state in elephants. This is a period of heightened sexual aggression that elephants go through periodically—bull elephants. So he thought, maybe with LSD, we can inject this elephant and artificially induce it. And maybe we can learn something about how we can artificially induce moods in humans through this somehow—I don’t know. But that was his idea.
So he takes a large dose of LSD—even when accounting for body mass, because an elephant is so much larger—but even accounting for that, it’s unreasonably large.
He doses this elephant with LSD. Pretty soon, it starts stumbling. It falls onto its mate—Judy is her name. The elephant’s name is Tusko in this.
He falls onto his side. He goes into an epileptic seizure. He defecates himself and then dies.
And in the report that Jolly West writes on this, he kind of ends it on a very bland but somewhat humorous note, basically saying, “It seems like the elephant is highly susceptible to LSD.” I guess so. You just killed it.
When you read these stories, and the book reads like a novel that’s just incredible and a real page-turner. But when you think of the way people talk about LSD and how crazy hippies were—and, you know, Haight-Ashbury in the late ’60s or Diane Linkletter, who of course did not have LSD or any drugs in her system when she committed suicide thinking she could fly like Superman—all of these strange, far-out stories of hippiedom.
And then when you start looking at people in suits and ties 10, 20 years before, doing stuff that is insane. It really is powerful to recover how weird all of this stuff was.
One of the other things that’s interesting about MKUltra is that it did get shut down. It’s not like, ok, it came to light—and we’ll talk about how and why we know anything about it in a minute—but the CIA did shut it down.
They were like, “Ok, this isn’t working.” And now, we’re talking in an era of DOGE and whatnot, and I don’t know if this is a success story—that there was a program that the federal government was funding that didn’t work, and they were like, “Ok, we’re going to stop doing it,” instead of tripling its budget.
But why did the CIA shut it down?
Well, it was largely unsuccessful. Gottlieb goes into a lot of detail about this in his deposition, basically saying, “We didn’t achieve what we thought we could.”
You can’t use some kind of drug to manipulate someone to do whatever you want. You can’t even use it to necessarily make them tell the truth in an interrogation.
It’s very ironic, because the OSS—the precursor to the CIA—they had already concluded this in the 1940s. They had already done truth drug experiments.
But you can—and we learn this, I guess, in every war—but especially in the 21st-century wars, the lesson that the intelligence services and the armed forces learn is that you can get people to say exactly what you want them to say if you beat them and torture them enough.
Yeah, it’s just not necessarily—
No, it almost never is, right? Which is very complicating in all of this. So how did MKUltra get shut down?
Yeah. It was shut down. It started in 1953. It went really until the early ’60s—MKUltra itself. And then, into the late ’60s, it kind of morphed into a different cryptonym that was named MKSearch.
This continued several subprojects of MKUltra, but it kind of fizzled out in the late 1960s. By that time, Sidney Gottlieb, himself, wasn’t really involved in it too much anymore. In fact, he was going to retire in 1973 anyway.
So MKUltra had been largely unsuccessful. And there were several occurrences that made even the inspector generals of the CIA reconsider what’s going on here.
In 1963, one of the inspector generals—John Ehrman—he writes a report. And in his words, he says that MKUltra is “illegal and unethical.” Those are his words in 1963. And yet it continued for several years—at least MKSearch—after that.
So several instances like that slowly put the brakes on MKUltra. And then, especially, Sidney Gottlieb retires in 1973, as does the head of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, who was one of the big champions of MKUltra throughout its time.
And Richard Helms is a villain, right? In this book as well, and I think, in American and World history, for the most part.
He doesn’t come off well.
Can you discuss how—I mean, I don’t quite know how to bridge into this topic—but Helms, among many things, is famous for somehow destroying more documents than he created. And MKUltra is put into a virtually complete burn bag. When Helms is leaving, he’s like, “we’re getting rid of all of these records.”
How do we know about MKUltra? How did it come to light?
Yeah, I’m really glad you asked that, because this is one thing that a lot of people know about MKUltra—that, “oh, the records were destroyed when Gottlieb and Helms retired from the CIA in 1973.” They threw the records into the incinerator—at least the records they knew about.
And so it does raise this important question: Well, how do we know anything? Maybe MKUltra was controlling sex slaves, or maybe it was doing this or that. You can kind of invent any conspiracy, because after all, they destroyed the records. We don’t know, do we?
And they all become believable once you know, among other things, that in an MKUltra-related experiment, Whitey Bulger, as a young gangster, was dosed with LSD every day straight for like a month—without being told—and then released without ever having been told what had happened to him.
So MKUltra is—the bits we know about it really make you conjecture wildly about it.
That’s exactly right. And I mean, here’s another subproject that’s just as wild—that leads people to think, “well, of course they must have been doing something even crazier. Because how could they have even conceived of this in the 1950s and ’60s?”
One subproject was to implant electrodes into the brains of animals—like dogs, rats, cats—and to try to remotely control their movements via electric signals. So if they would move in the desired direction, you would stimulate a pleasure center of the brain and reinforce that movement.
And this actually worked. You could actually get these animals to move in desired directions.
So, these kinds of crazy subprojects—yeah, it does lead one to think, how off the walls is that compared to something else? Surely something else.
Here’s how we actually know about MKUltra:
For one, Gottlieb and Helms didn’t destroy all the files. We have thousands and thousands of files that didn’t get destroyed—that they didn’t know about—it was in a budget and fiscal section of the CIA’s archives center. That they didn’t think to check to throw away.
So we have a lot of the financial records of all these subprojects. In fact, we have the internal descriptions of 146 out of the 149 subprojects. So we have the descriptions of what they are, as well as a lot of details about what they are too, just within those files.
In addition to that, there were multiple congressional investigations into what was going on within the CIA and other intelligence organizations in the 1970s. So we have testimony from people who were involved—people who were subpoenaed and required to testify before these committees and hearings.
We also have multiple people who were involved—especially victims—who would write memoirs about this.
We had multiple lawsuits, such as the Orlikow lawsuit, that furnished us with all these depositions that I found—thousands of pages. There are other government reports, there are institutional records that got released after these institutions found out they had been funded by MKUltra.
So we have a lot of documentation on this. And I’m really glad you raised that point, because some people get the impression, well, we can’t know anything, so it could be anything. But that’s not quite the case. We actually know a lot about MKUltra—even though we can never know everything about MKUltra.
You know, the ’70s are a fascinating decade for many, many reasons—the least of which is the fact that I grew up in the ’70s, so I’m very fascinated by it.
I was too young to understand what the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee were doing, and they were two of the principal institutions through which the American public learned that the government was acting in just incredible ways to contravene all kinds of constitutional limits on what the FBI, the CIA, the NSA could do.
Could you talk a bit about how was this type of material received at the time? Because this is also when the American economy is kind of in the crapper. The Cold War seems like, if it’s doing anything, it’s leaning toward the Soviets. I mean, this is a period of palpable sense of decline or stagnation in America.
How was this stuff received when congressional members—and, you know, Frank Church, ok, he’s a lefty populist from Idaho, whatever—but then, you know, Nelson Rockefeller is not some kind of crazy hippie or anything.
How was this stuff received at the time?
In many ways, it contributes to the kind of anti-government sentiment that had been building up for years before then. You had the Watergate scandal. You had the Vietnam War.
Now, you have multiple revelations coming out of the intelligence community—from these commissions—about how, not only did they drug unwitting people as part of MKUltra, slip LSD into their wine or whatever, but also they were spying on anti-war protesters and tapping phones and doing all kinds of stuff.
So, it’s continuing to add to this distrust of government that had already been building already before that.
The Rockefeller Commission is started—really, ironically—because Gerald Ford, the president, wanted to prevent certain information from getting out. He didn’t want people to know about what was called the Family Jewels. This was a series of documents within the CIA—
Could you recount the story? I mean, this is like—it’s the perfect Gerald Ford story. Because people think, oh, he was clumsy, he tripped a lot. Mentally, the story of how he basically made public the existence of these Family Jewels—the CIA’s secret histor.
Could you recount that briefly?
Definitely. So, the head of the CIA at the time, Schlesinger, he wanted to compile a list of all the illegal things that CIA personnel had done in the past, so that he could prevent it from leaking out.
He wanted to have a sense of what had gone on, in case some reporter breaks some story he would know what they’re talking about.
So he asked all present and former members of the CIA: “Please submit to me any programs that you were involved in that you think might have been illegal.”
He compiles this 600-page document—almost 700 pages—called, internally called, the Family Jewels.
And again, this is going against the compartmentalization, because you’re compiling all of this into one space.
This is shortly after he had purged many people from their posts, and so there were a lot of disgruntled CIA personnel. And it seems like one of them leaked this document—or at least portions of it—to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh at The New York Times.
Pretty soon afterward, Hersh has this document, and the front page of The New York Times says: “CIA has been spying on anti-war protesters.”That’s just one of the things in the Family Jewels. So now that it’s kind of leaked out, Gerald Ford can’t do nothing about it—because it’s the biggest story in the country.
So he determines, “well, if I create some kind of commission”—this Rockefeller Commission—”then we can at least have control over what gets leaked out, or what gets out. We can say that we’re investigating the intelligence community, the CIA, and we can kind of put out what we want to put out and prevent what we don’t want getting out from getting out.”
So he creates this commission. And while he’s at a dinner with some editors from The New York Times shortly after this, they kind of ask him, “What else is in the CIA’s closet that hasn’t come out yet?”
And he just says, kind of off the cuff, “Well, assassinations—something like that.”
And they all kind of stop what they’re doing: “What? Like, has the CIA been involved in assassinations?”
And as soon as he said it, he immediately says afterward: “That’s off the record. That’s off the record.”
So this eventually leads to CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr, who goes to press with it. He does a story about CIA assassinations.
And after this comes out, that prompts the congressional committees—the Church Committee and the Pike Committee—to form and investigate these past abuses, and not allow the executive branch to have sole control over what gets out.
It’s not a conspiracy to say that Gerald Ford, as a congressman, had been a member of the Warren Commission. He clearly thought if he created a commission that would kind of be under his auspices—Nelson Rockefeller is his vice president—he’d be able to control the narrative.
Obviously, the Warren Commission report—which, ironically, I think is accurate in large points. But that did not control the narrative about the JFK assassination. And clearly, the Rockefeller Commission did not either.
Let’s linger. Again, what is also fascinating about this book—and anybody who is interested in weird Cold War history is going to love this book, anybody interested in drug culture, this is for you. I mean, there are lots of different audiences.
But what I find particularly striking about it—and particularly since you’re a historian—you draw two big lessons toward the end of the book. The first is about the problems of having secret organizations within an open society or a democratic society.
Can you talk a bit about why analyzing and understanding MKUltra—what are the main lessons for contemporary America as we struggle with things like transparency? We’re reading this after Snowden, after Assange. So there’s kind of a forced transparency, but it does seem like any time you think about it—or wait a couple days—something new and weird that was secret comes out.
Can you talk about that?
I can, yes. One chapter in the book is called “The Vicious Cycle of Secrecy,” where I try to explain what were the parameters within the CIA that would allow for something like this to happen.
It seems patently unethical that you would dose unwitting people with drugs, or perform these experiments on them without their consent. How could that have been allowed to occur? And then, what can be done to prevent that from happening in the future?
I identify three problems that I think allowed this to happen within the CIA.
One is compartmentalization, which I talked about earlier. I should mention: these things are necessary for an intelligence organization. It just is the case that they have to keep secrets. It can’t be the case that we can know everything the CIA knows itself. There has to be some secrets.
But at the same time, the secrecy they’re afforded can allow them to avoid accountability. Because if we don’t know what they’re up to, how can we ever hold them accountable for what we don’t know?
So, compartmentalization is one thing within the CIA that contributed to these abusive actions.
Another one is the lack of a paper trail. The fact that these documents were destroyed—and there was no repercussions for Gottlieb destroying these documents. He destroyed them. He left. Richard Helms destroyed them. He left.
I mean, Gottlieb not only was granted legal immunity, but he got one of the CIA’s highest awards for service.
He did. Yeah, he did. Some of that has to do with the fact that he also became head of what was called the Technical Services Division, which was in charge of creating gadgets and weapons and stuff like that. So he was an influential head of that.
I think they were probably rewarding him more for that than for MKUltra.
Ok, well, those also—I mean, that’s like the LSD-laced scuba suits for Castro, exploding guitars. I guess he’s somewhat implicated—or it was not his anthrax, was it, that ended up being used on Lumumba or anything?
That’s not what killed Lumumba, but he did procure the anthrax. And he personally took it to the Congo to try to kill Lumumba with it. He gave it to an agent there who failed to sneak it into Lumumba’s toothpaste. But nevertheless, he was involved in that plot.
So, those are some of the problems within the CIA. And then I try to answer the question of: Once you have secrecy in an intelligence organization like the CIA or the FBI, that inherently leads to what I call this vicious cycle.
Secrecy leads to plausible deniability—because if nobody knows what you’re doing, you can always deny that you had anything to do with it. Secrecy leads to plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability leads to risky behavior. Because again, if you’re not going to be held accountable for something—because nobody knows that you did it—what’s to stop you from doing something riskier than you otherwise would, if you could be held accountable?
Risky behavior, in many cases, leads to embarrassment. This gets exposed on the front page of The New York Times. A scoop gets leaked to a reporter. Someone finds out about this.
It’s almost inevitable that a huge program like this—someone is going to leak it. Someone is going to find out, when there are many victims like this.
And then embarrassment leads to secrecy: “Oh, we got out that time, we better make sure we really tamp down and prevent people from doing this.”
And now you’re starting the vicious cycle over again: secrecy, plausible deniability, embarrassment, secrecy…
How do you intercede? How do you intervene to break that cycle?
I think one of the main ways is to have external oversight instead of internal oversight.
One of the points I make in the book is that the CIA inspector general—there were multiple inspector generals who wrote reports about MKUltra where they said this is illegal and unethical and it continued. Nothing happened to it.
So there was an impotent internal inspector general. Instead, you have to have some kind of external oversight.
I think James Madison was right when he said, basically, you need checks and balances. We have to have different branches checking each other.
Throughout the Cold War, for the most part, the oversight prerogative of Congress was largely impotent itself. They didn’t really oversee the intelligence community.
Occasionally, they would meet with officials from the CIA and get updates, but it was mostly wining and dining sessions. They really wouldn’t know. In many cases, these congressional elected representatives, they didn’t want to know what was going on in the CIA—because then that eliminates your plausible deniability.
Well, and there seemed to be—I don’t want to pretend it’s naivete or something—but there was also, among Congress or among elites—electoral elites, cultural elites… I mean, the CIA pulled disproportionately from the campus of Yale and stuff like that.
But there was this sense that, “I can trust you,” right? I mean, like, “You wouldn’t be doing anything that is either truly awful or ineffective.”
I think part of that rationale—that mindset—also comes from a World War II hangover.
We had this secret project—the Manhattan Project—and Congress didn’t really know what was going on there. They knew that we had a budget for something, but who knows we’re making an atomic bomb?
After the war, though, it’s seen that Congress—many of these congressional members—say, “We were glad we didn’t know that was going on. Because if we did, we probably would have shut it down. So, thank you for not informing us.”
And that mindset kind of carries over. Maybe it’s in the country’s national security best interest for us not to know some of the things that are going on in these secret hallways—because they might be developing things that we can’t allow if we know about it. But if we don’t know about it, maybe it will eventually pay off, like the atomic bomb did.
Well, can we—obviously Britain had a different kind of thing, where they had a lot of trust and a lot of secrecy, and then that actually allowed for mass penetration of British intelligence services because everybody was kind of in the same club.
But in the U.S., I mean, one of the things that seems to come out after the collapse of the Soviet Union—and then again when we start looking at the various kinds of intelligence services or operations after 9/11—you start to see that the CIA, like the FBI, seems to be unbelievably incompetent.
The CIA did not know that the Soviet Union was about to collapse. When you look at the torture protocols that were both hidden and praised within U.S. war efforts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, they did not deliver usable intelligence.
A lot of people—as George W. Bush became less and less popular during his presidency—a lot of people on the left, and even some on the right, were like: “We’ve got to get rid of secrecy. We’ve got to get rid of surveillance of Americans.”
But then when Snowden revealed that all of that stuff was going on—either slightly modified or unmodified—under Obama, and Obama said, “Oh yeah, I think it would be good to have a discussion about all of this stuff,” after he was elected promising the most transparent administration in American history…
It seems like we’re not as interested in that. And now you have a Trump administration, which in many ways is filled—Trump ran against the deep state.
And if the CIA and the FBI are kind of part of the deep state, right? Somebody like Kash Patel, who was head of the FBI, was talking about how he was going to totally blow up the FBI because it’s kind of a criminal organization.
All of this is just to say—have we learned the lesson from MKUltra? Or is that kind of a partisan coat? If you’re out of power, you say, “We need more openness and more transparency.” And then the minute you get into power, you’re like, “No, not so much.”
Yeah, I think that might be the case to a certain extent.
I think it could also be the case that when people get into power—to get elected, you say anything to get elected. But once you’re elected, you can’t say anything—because you actually know what’s going on.
It might be the case that you get into power and you realize, well, what I was saying wasn’t quite accurate. It’s not like there is this nefarious deep state out to manipulate—
Well, with Trump—it’s not like he didn’t have access to all of the classified documents the first time around, right?
Right.
So then, when you talk about external oversight, is it Congress? Because it doesn’t seem like Congress is up to that.
And if it’s not Congress—or some subset of them—and maybe not all members of Congress, because this is kind of the way it works. There are people who have higher security clearance or get more information.
If it’s not Congress, then who would it be?
Yeah, if it is Congress, I think in order for them to be more effective at the job of oversight, you have to almost restructure the incentives of Congress—to actually govern instead of just focus on a reelection campaign or something.
So I don’t know if that would be through open primaries, or ranked-choice voting, or proportional representation, or something that might enable them to focus more on governance than just getting reelected.
But some kind of reform might help Congress to do the overseeing that they are obliged to do.
If it’s not Congress, though—which I think it needs to be Congress, in addition to other things—then it has to be the press.
It has to be a free press and free speech that allows people to speak truth to power. It has to be someone like Seymour Hersh, who’s able to discuss and post these illegal things that the government is doing, and inform people when he figures out that that’s been happening
One might say about Sy Hersh over the years—he has alienated virtually every presidential administration. So he might be onto something there.
The other big lesson, which in a way—because I don’t know what you and I can do about politics or about the CIA, et cetera—you implore people to draw a lesson about conspiracy thinking.
This is a fantastic end to the book, where you talk about how Sidney Gottlieb wanted to find ways of manipulating people’s minds. He didn’t do it through chemical ways, but we manipulate our own minds and fall prey to conspiracy thinking or just bad theorizing about what’s going on.
Can you talk a little bit about that lesson that you want people to draw from Project Mind Control?
Thank you. Yeah, this last chapter—I especially wanted to focus on the conspiracy theories that come out of MKUltra, because there are a lot of them.
And I mentioned, the main reason why, earlier is that because a lot of the files were destroyed, we can paint MKUltra to be our wildest imagination. It could be anything. If we can say it could be this, who’s to say we’re wrong? We can always say, “It must have been in those files that were destroyed.” So there are a lot of conspiracies that come out of this.
So, I try to identify several errors in critical thinking that some of these conspiracy theorists make, especially about MKUltra.
One is just factual errors. Some people are saying that MKUltra still continues, or whatever. If you’re asserting the claim, the burden of proof is on you. You’ve got to give me some reason to think that’s actually the case.
Other errors common to these conspiracy theories is the lack of any kind of documentary evidence for anything that they’re saying.
For instance, one of the manipulations that they, themselves, use is the fact that they can never be wrong because the lack of evidence is itself evidence of a cover-up. So it becomes a non-falsifiable theory.
I talk about this in the book, particularly one conspiracy theorist named Cathy O’Brien. She has a book on MKUltra. She claims to have been an MKUltra sex slave from the time she was a young girl, bred into the program and so on.
I don’t think that’s true. But she says, “Why can’t I provide more documentation? I could, if the CIA would release the documents—but they can’t.”
Well, that just makes it non-falsifiable. It can’t be proven, but it also can’t be disproven. So, what’s the point? So I don’t think that’s the case.
In fact, she says she was a victim of an MKUltra subproject called Project Monarch. The first time that I found that Project Monarch, which I don’t think exists, actually occurs in writing somewhere is in this journal called Phoenix, in 1993. And that journal itself claims to have been created by a nine-foot-tall alien from the Pleiades star system. So this is where some of this is coming from. Obviously, we know who actually created the journal—but he claimed he was an alien channeling these things.
So, you really got to figure out where some of this is going to be—
As we’re talking—I’m not sure when this will air—but as we’re talking, Elon Musk just trolled Donald Trump— now that they’re on the outs with each other— saying that Trump is in the Epstein files.
And the Epstein files—of Jeffrey Epstein—seems to be this type of thing where there is a lot of stuff that’s out there. There are probably no literal “Epstein files,” but when you think about it…
Do you think we’re in a particularly hot moment for conspiracy thinking? Or is it really kind of a steady state throughout American history? Are we more or less prone to conspiracizing now?
I vacillate on the answer to this question.
Sometimes I do look at, especially these MKUltra conspiracies, and I think these are very absurd and it seems so prominent. Cathy O’Brien, for instance—her best friend is Roseanne Barr, who is very influential. So, ok, they have a lot of influence.
But at the same time, I think back and well, there were witch crazes that were highly influential. Conspiracy theories have been around forever.
What’s new, though, especially, is social media. The fact that something can spread from anyone to anyone in the world immediately. I think that does heighten our susceptibility to these conspiracy theories and heightens the amount that they can travel and the amount of people who are affected by them.
I think that’s the key difference. So I think we actually might be in a somewhat unique period, in the fact that there are more conspiracy-addled people around just by the fact that they have more access to these theories.
Do you think it’s also true—particularly on social media, like through meme culture — if such a thing can be said to exist — there’s a lot of ironizing of conspiracy theories?
I’m thinking of the mid-1970s novel trilogy Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. One of the reasons why I think so many people today are talking about the Illuminati is because this is a parody of conspiracy thinking.
Which now sometimes is used as a joke, and other times it’s a real thing. But it seems to me we ironize conspiracy theories now in a way that might be different.
Can you explain that? What do you mean, “ironize” conspiracy?
That people just say it because it’s fun and interesting. They don’t really believe it, that it’s just weird.
Michael Shermer kind of makes this point. He has a book called Conspiracy, and he talks about, in some cases, it seems like people espouse these views not necessarily because they believe them—it’s not a literal truth—but he says it’s more like a “mythic truth.”
This is the kind of thing my group says. Do we really believe this? I don’t know. But we say this just to signal: I’m part of the in-group. If you can accept that I might believe this, then you already know a suite of all my other beliefs.
So you know I’m friendly to you, or that I believe in your beliefs too.
I think something like that might be going on. But at the same time, I do read enough of these conspiracy theories to think: a lot of them are actually serious.
No, and it seems more and more people in powerful positions are happy, ready, and willing—cultural leaders as well as political leaders, business leaders—to espouse conspiracy theories unironically.
You teach at UT Austin. Do you feel like your students are up to the challenge of being critical consumers of whether social media or older forms of media?
I’ve been really impressed with my students.
I have a couple small classes. I teach the history of science, so I don’t teach the intelligence community anymore. My job now—I teach courses on science and religion before Newton, after Newton. I have a course on Newton. I teach a course called Great Works in Biology, Modern Science.
So it’s all history of science stuff. And I’m really impressed with how good at critical thinking a lot of my students are.
There are cultural memes about how students today all they rely on is ChatGPT and they’re not doing critical thinking. But I think they’re way smarter than I was when I was in college—and I didn’t have any of that.
So I don’t know—I’m really impressed with the students.
Well, maybe they have better teachers than you had.
Maybe. Maybe. The truth may get to me—
In some of your writing, you’ve talked about how— I’m butchering the title here— I’m paraphrasing an article from Smithsonian Magazine about how our relationship to authority in science is complicated. That came out in 2020.
Can you talk a little bit about how do questions of legitimacy of government or authority…
You talk about it in the context of the Cold War and the CIA and MKUltra, but since COVID, we’ve had this collapse of righteous authority of public figures.
The Trump’s White House team that he put together during COVID —he’s the one who put Anthony Fauci on TV every day—that became a bitter enemy. A lot of people in public health contradicted themselves or admitted to telling “noble lies” in the interest of getting people to stay home, wear masks, or get vaccinated.
How do we deal with that very heavily dispute authority in something like science?
Yeah, the question really comes down to trust. How do we know who to trust?
This is a question that I ask my students many times on the first day of class: How do you actually know that the Earth goes around the sun?
We all think the Earth goes around the sun—I hope. How do you actually know that?
When it comes down to it, for most people it’s just: “I’ve been told that’s the case. I was told when I was in elementary school that Earth is one of the planets that goes around the sun.”
Why do we actually know that, though? In these history of science classes, I try to tell how we actually know that—how we can show that’s the case, at least for the most part. But it’s not an easy question to answer about something so fundamental to what we believe about the universe. We go around the sun, of course. But why?
When you really drill down, it’s not easy to come to a question. The true answer is trust. We trust someone who told us that’s the case.
In many cases within our lives, it comes down to trust. I trust when I go to the doctor that he knows how to treat a broken bone. Instead of treating it myself, I have trust.
So then the question is: How do we know who to trust?
We have to trust someone. We can’t read every single scientific study on every single thing. There’s just no possible way anyone could ever do that and form their own opinions on every single thing.
At some point you have to trust someone. And so the question becomes, again, how do we know who to trust? That is going to lead us to credentials. Did they go to a school and get a degree? Now if that’s the case, maybe that gives more credence in what they’re saying, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right.
So if they’re not necessarily right, well, then is there a better way to determine who to trust? Maybe not a single individual, maybe the consensus of experts in a particular field. So if the consensus of people, well, that’s better than one single individual because it’s kind of drowned out by people who know— one expert can be a liar about something. But then, at the same time, the consensus can be wrong.
I mean, that’s how scientific revolutions happen, right? The consensus is wrong, and then someone comes along with a better explanation.
Exactly.
Ideally, within science, we have an approximation of the truth that’s pretty good—and maybe we get a better approximation.
So if we’re in the Newtonian paradigm, and we believe in Newtonian gravity—as he set it down, that the strength of force is proportional to mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance—that’s a really good approximation for what we now think is true.
So just because we might have a scientific revolution to you know general relativity, it doesn’t necessarily mean Newton was wrong, it means that we have a better approximation. But Newton’s was a pretty good approximation already. So yeah, that’s an important point to make, maybe.
When people talk about Thomas Kuhn and paradigms and scientific revolutions, it’s not necessarily the case that because we might switch from one theory to another, from Newtonian gravity to general relativity, we don’t throw out Newtonian and gravity. It’s a good approximation. It can do a lot of good.
Do you think, in a kind of political and cultural context, does it help? In the ’70s, there was an attempt to do this in the United States with the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission to kind of come clean about things.
Does that work? Like, when experts or authorities say, “Ok, you know what we got it wrong, and we’re admitting that publicly,” does that help increase trust? Or does that actually accelerate the lack of confidence?
Because when you think about—I’ve written a lot about changes in generalized trust in America—and since the early ’70s, it’s just been downhill. And it doesn’t matter when people come clean. It seems like, then it’s like, “Aha! I knew you were lying. So I’m going to have even less trust and confidence.”
I hope it helps.
I think it could depend on the context. In the sense that—at the point we’re in—I feel like there’s so much distrust in an agency like the CIA.
Building off the things we’ve talked about so far from like Watergate, Vietnam, MKUltra, spying on people—so many of those instances have built up that I feel a lot of trust in governmental organizations, especially in the intelligence community, is so shot right now.
Even if they were to say, “Look, we’re coming clean here. These are the skeletons in our closet. We’re sorry for what we did,” I think people would have the mindset: “You’re just doing that in order to cover up what you’re actually doing.”
There could be other instances in history where the opposite could be the case—where maybe we weren’t at such a nadir of trust, that if someone comes clean for something, it seems like they’re actually trying to put the right foot forward. We might give them the benefit of the doubt.
But I think it’s going to be really hard for the CIA to come back from the reputational damage that a program like MKUltra has done.
One of the ironies of MKUltra—they wanted to keep it secret, of course, not let people know, because they knew there was going to be backlash.
It’s not as if they didn’t find anything in MKUltra. They did find some things—you could do certain things to manipulate people in a certain way. You could make them seem crazy by giving them LSD. There are interrogation techniques they developed that might actually be helpful that they’re working on.
But for all the “benefits” they got from this multi-million-dollar program, it’s nothing compared to the reputational damage—the backlash—that has come.
If you were to tell someone at the beginning of MKUltra, “Here’s the trade-off.” Even if you were able to determine mind control is possible through these drugs, I still don’t know if it would have been worth it.
Because the backlash has been so long-lasting and effective, I don’t know if they’re ever going to regain the public’s trust after something like that.
So, I don’t really know if that’s possible—no matter what they do at this point, which is hard to say. It might require some more extreme reform than just saying they’re sorry.
I don’t know what they could do. I hope they figure it out.
All right, well, that’s a great note to end on.
The book is Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.
John Lisle, thanks so much for talking to Reason.
Thanks for having me.
- Producer: Paul Alexander
- Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
